More than one way to rig a cat

When it comet to rigging there are various was to approach it, you may be following a tutorial, making something of your own or even something never tried before with a milling different connections and mel scripts. The one think to keep in mind thought it is it relevant...

What I mean by this is if your animation is only going to be about 30 seconds and the camera is mainly looking at there face then those 15 hours adding IK/FK to every finger toe might seem a bit wasted. Also think about if you're likely to be using this character again soon as spending 15 adding a good foot role will be easier than trying to add it later when you have to dig up all the hidden nodes and controls.

Then the most important part to remember is naming conventions. Not only will it make your rig look neat and tidy, it will safe a heck of a lot of time. For example if you name every joint that is going to be used to bind to the skin, if you use a prefix of something like bn (short for bind), when it comes to skinning you can simply use maya's search tool to select all objects with a prefix of bn. That might seem small but if your making quite a complex character being able to search and select a large group of similar objects is essential.

Another naming convention to keep in mind is where it is on the rig, if its joints for the leg, name them with the correct term like knee of ankle, this is also essential if the rig is intended to be used by someone else. Other good practices are using _l_ or _r_ for left and right, this way if your rig is symmetrical, you can make some side and quickly mirror it across making maya change the _l_ to _r_ and save yourself from any tedious renaming.

Whilst making/rigging my character for "what am i" there are a lot of muscles involved, so everything that's involved in the muscle system was given a prefix of mus. Also any joint that are used to bind to the face were given a prefix of bn_face, this way i can quickly select binding joints of a specific area of the rig. Then always remember to add a number at the end (e.g. bn_l_wrist01) as later down the line you may need to add a similar joint and there will be a naming clash, this was essential for me as when i made the muscle i decided half way through that id add some more, so i was able to use the same naming convention and just change the 01 at the end to 02.